"Foil the NSA and Prism with a Tor proxy," Raspberry Pi Foundation says.

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The do-it-yourselfers at Adafruit have provided step-by-step instructions for turning a Raspberry Pi into a Tor proxy and wireless access point. A good project for users looking to anonymize their Internet traffic, "Onion Pi" requires just a Raspberry Pi, a few standard peripherals, and some work in the command line.

You'll need a Pi (of course), an Ethernet cable, a Wi-Fi adapter with an antenna, an SD card loaded with the Raspbian operating system, and a power supply. You can buy all these from Adafruit in the company's Onion Pi Pack, but the components are pretty standard and could be obtained from many other sources. A portion of sales through Adafruit will go to the Tor Foundation.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is excited about the project, saying it could let users "Foil the NSA and Prism with a Tor proxy." Using Tor routes your Internet traffic through several relays in an attempt to hide your location and identity.

"Using it is easy-as-pie," Adafruit wrote. "First, plug the Ethernet cable into any Internet provider [sic] in your home, work, hotel or conference/event. Next, power up the Pi with the Micro USB cable to your laptop or to the wall adapter. The Pi will boot up and create a new secure wireless access point called Onion Pi. Connecting to that access point will automatically route any web browsing from your computer through the anonymizing Tor network."

Users would install Tor through the command line, then edit the host access point to something like "Onion Pi" and change the network password. A few more commands then change the IP routing tables to route Wi-Fi connections through Tor.

If all gets set up right, you'll be able to connect to the access point from a computer, smartphone, or tablet just like you normally would. For extra credit, you could set up your Pi as a Tor relay to help improve the Tor network for all its users. Get started with Onion Pi by checking out Adafruit's tutorial.

Promoted Comments

I thought that Tor was pretty much defeated as far as anonymity goes. Can't a determined agency still figure out where you're coming from even if you're using it?

No, not really. What can happen is that you can leak traffic at exit nodes if the traffic isn't encrypted. So if you're connecting to something that's not using SSL for instance, anyone can still see that traffic. If that traffic contains personal data, you're a bit SOL. Or if you use Tor in general for anything personally identifiable.

The only way you'd manage to compromise the Tor network is by exploiting the majority of the nodes in the network with a compromised version of Tor that leaks traffic as it passes through. It's possible but improbable that an organization like the NSA is doing this right now. Keep in mind any intelligence gathering inevitably means a lot of red tape. It might not matter if they can compromise the network if the report of given activity sits on an analyst's desk for two months.

You may be thinking of Bitcoin (since it's often used in conjunction with Tor), which although individual addresses are anonymous (i.e. you don't know who owns address xyz), all transactions are public and verifiable, so if you know who owns a given address, you can trace the transactions associated with them.

So this seems like a very cool idea that I'd love to try. Noob question: would I be able to run my existing wireless network and this one simultaneously as independent networks? I'd love to set this up as a public wifi hotspot, limit the bandwidth available to it, and run Tor on it. And then have my regular wireless network available for applications that need higher speed. Possible?

Generally the ISP doesn't allow you to run a "public" connection from your home, so chances are that if you try you're technically breaking the contract.

But if you're doing so on a TOR network connection, good luck to them proving that you are!

Noob question: would I be able to run my existing wireless network and this one simultaneously as independent networks? I'd love to set this up as a public wifi hotspot, limit the bandwidth available to it, and run Tor on it. And then have my regular wireless network available for applications that need higher speed. Possible?

Sure. Say you have a WiFi router setup as your "home" WiFi network. Nothing will stop you from plugging this into your router via ethernet and having another WiFi network called "tor" (or whatever). Both use your internet, but this device will send everything over the Tor network through your network, where your home WiFi sends everything like normal.